Wayfair Driving Repeat Customers

The 2015 financial results from Wayfair are pretty positive, particularly in the area of sales driven by returning customers.

The online home furnishings and decor retailer recently released its financials for both Q4 and the full year 2015, and as Retail Dive notes, repeat sales helped to contribute to the 85.5 percent increase that Wayfair experienced overall last year.

“We are excited to report an incredibly strong fourth quarter and tremendous overall growth for Wayfair in 2015, with the business reaching $2.25 billion in full-year net revenues,” Niraj Shah, CEO, cofounder and cochairman of Wayfair, stated in a company press release. “We continue to grow both our new customer base and our repeat business with an exceptional shopping experience that redefines what is possible in home retail. We remain firmly focused on delighting our customers as we continue to innovate and raise the bar in terms of selection, service and design inspiration. We look forward to making great strides in 2016 as we continue to build the Wayfair brand in the United States and ramp up our investment in Europe and Canada.”

While the repeat customers for Wayfair certainly boosted its 2015 sales, Internet Retailer makes sure to not discount the 770,000 new customers that the company took on in the fourth quarter.

“Wayfair’s favorable repeat customer dynamic is due, in part, to a proprietary data analytics platform that creates a personalized customer shopping experience,” Colin Sebastian, analyst at Robert W. Baird & Co., wrote in a note to investors (that the IR story shares). “For instance, outbound email content and prioritization of products are varied based on a user’s prior engagement, purchase history and demographic information. Wayfair sends more than 1 million different permutations of outbound emails on a daily basis, with improving personalization resulting in a 15 percent increase in email open rates.”